DeSimone: Freedom: A self destructing commodity

As for the mass murders going on these days, especially in our schools, the only way to solve the situation is to have a stricter control over guns. I think America, for all its virtues and benevolence, was born with a Colt-45 in each hand. It’s time to leave such nonsense to John Wayne, and restore a modicum of reason to this country before it is too late! One way to do this is to create a monopoly similar to Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board. In fact we should make all liquor stores privately owned, and turn the sale of arms into a state monopoly. I see nothing wrong with the arrangement.

The NRA has become the dictatorial powers they warn us against, that will raise arms against the average citizens unless they’re armed. Never mind that these things tend to hurt our people, young and old. We are obligated to have a driver’s license, why not keep track of gun owners in the same way? No one denies us our right to drive a car, but the State must know who is doing so and for what purpose.

One of the most dangerous contributors to the disorder now reigning in the entire western world is the modern entertainment industry. They’re completely without morals, and so our society keeps going on its downhill pattern like a bus out of control. The forces that at one time were efficacious in scaring the devil out of people no longer seem to be working. When the universal church loses her ability to scare people into behaving decently and responsibly, the police state must take over the job. The American people have never experienced that kind of control and I don’t know that they will be able to survive it.

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In 1949, with the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four, the term Big Brother rose into prominence. It was suggestive of Big Government coming into our very bedrooms to spy on us. Isn’t that where we are right now? We walk down Main Street of Anytown, USA, and we are photographed every step of the way. Perhaps we should have our own Oscar night to see which of us is the biggest star!

The internet gives out information on each individual complete with address, telephone number, age, marital status, etc. We still think that we are free and in a sense we are, but in reality we the people are being bombarded by advertisements on television, radio, newspapers and magazines. That is a form of mind control. Our computers are replete with unsolicited ads popping up all over the place. Last week, I typed in something I needed to open on my computer. As the document appeared on my desk top, an Amazon window appeared simultaneously on the right. I was stunned when I saw it: it was my own book, Suffer the Children – Growing up in Italy during WWII. I didn’t order the ad so Amazon is selling my book and pocketing my emoluments.

Going back to the Newtown massacre, as I consider culpability, something comes to my mind and I can’t shake it. I, too, at age eleven, was in a situation analogous to that of those poor little children in Newtown, only the people who fired at me were not deranged or drug marinated misfits, but the members of the U.S. and British armed forces, not to mention their Nazi opponents. That’s the very reason I titled my book of war memoirs, Suffer the Children, because in war the children are the ones most affected by the insanity of the adult world.

A number of years ago, the Times Herald placed on its front page a picture of the last B-24 bomber that’s still flying. It was a front view of the big bomber in full alar display. It was beautiful! They also interviewed a veteran from Conshohocken who had flown many missions in Italy. He said that when the bombs exploded they looked like “puffs of white smoke.” It never dawned on him that there was much red mixed with the white: the blood of thousands of innocent victims. Some of the victims were my friends. Even my favorite teacher was killed.

In the nineties, I had a chance to speak on the telephone with the late Sen. George McGovern, who was a B-24 pilot during the last year of WWII. Those planes flew over my hometown every day on missions out of the air fields of Cerignola, a hundred miles south of where I lived. The American and British airmen had set up a club where they could unwind after each mission. The Senator told me that one day, on entering the club, he overheard two fighter pilots, probably British, bragging that, “Them two ‘Eye-talians’ will never fish again, ha, ha, ha!” The future senator scolded them for their callousness. They had strafed two men fishing off a pier somewhere along the Adriatic shore. The fact is that the line between killing your enemy and murdering innocent civilians is a thin one. But the Senator himself killed many people, enemy or not. It is difficult to feel responsible for the death of innocent people from thirty thousand feet in the air. When confronted by the father of a child one of his men had shot, a Nazi officer philosophized, “C’est la guerre!” And that was their absolution!

But America is not a war zone now, especially not in a classroom full of first graders. These wild-west shenanigans are happening much too frequently, and it is high time we put an end to them. Let’s restore order in the social structure of America, now!